Mary Chun

Conductor Mary Chun, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, specializes in contemporary music. She is the longtime conductor of the contemporary music group Earplay. Chun was born in Pasadena, California, and grew up in Tulare County in the state's Central Valley. Her parents were Chinese immigrants, and she was the only one of her siblings who was born in the U.S. Her family spotted her musical talent and urged her to take piano lessons, which had been unavailable to them in China. Chun earned bachelor's and master's degrees from San Francisco State University, studying piano with Carlo Bussotti and conducting with Lászlo Varga. She went on for further studies at the University of Southern California and traveled to Britain in 1981. Chun is also one of the few professional players of the ondes Martenot electronic instrument in the U.S.; she played the instrument in a San Francisco Opera production of Messiaen's St. François d'Assise in 2002. Back in the U.S., Chun established a reputation as a specialist in contemporary opera and vocal music in the San Francisco Bay Area. She served on the conducting staff of various opera companies in the U.S. (the San Francisco Opera, the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, the Opera Theatre of St. Louis) and France (the Théâtre Chatelet in Paris and the Opéra Lyon). At the Opéra Lyon, she served as an assistant to conductor Kent Nagano on his 1992 recording of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. Chun conducted many contemporary opera premieres, including the first Canadian, French, and German performances of John Adams' I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and the world premieres of Carlos Lucero's Wuornos, Mort Garson's Revoco, and Libby Larsen's Every Man Jack. In 2000, she became conductor of Earplay, a contemporary music ensemble in Berkeley, and she made her classical recording debut with that group in 2004 on the album Jorge Liderman: Waking Dances. She also served as conductor on several Christian-oriented albums by composer Peter Allen and is the music director of the Sevenages Investment Company, a Beijing enterprise that mounts Broadway musicals in Mandarin translation. Chun has also worked with the Berkeley-based contemporary opera West Edge Opera and is the music director of the Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma, California. In 2023, Chun conducted the City Opera of Vancouver's recording of composer Alice Ping Yee Ho's opera Chinatown.
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